Funny story, my dad once got a letter from Stephen King’s lawyers informing my father that he was to cease and desist in sending mail to the author. What precipitated this letter, you ask? Well, my father thought it would be hilarious to send Mr. King a series of letters claiming that the ideas for It, The Shining, and The Stand had been stolen from my father via some sort of Mainer voodoo on the part of Stephen King. As it turns out Stephen King’s lawyers did not think this was in the least funny and were, instead, quite frightened. This blog series is inspired by those letters.
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Dearest Stone Phillips,
I am writing first and foremost to inform you that I received your message. I will admit that I gave up on us a long time ago. Once you were fired from NBC I had to come to terms with the fact that you were no longer going to visit my house, late at night, with softcore news stories about meth labs in middle America and three legged cats also in middle America and all manner of other things that happen in middle America . I even married another man, albeit another man who bares a striking resemblance to a younger you. In my defense, I only married Ben after he agreed to let me name our first child, regardless of gender, Stone.
But now everything is different. Yesterday I saw a rerun of Dateline and it included a segment about your personal life, specifically about how much you love your dad and how you grew up on a ranch or something. I know now that this particular rerun was meant to be viewed by me. As I was watching, riveted, I heard a disembodied voice telling me that this was a message from you, a message meant only for me. Stone, I will not disappoint you. I will be joining you in New York in just a few short days.
I want to assure you that I completely understood the message you were trying to telepathically communicate. The episode featured a piece about the over-prescription of medications in this country, so the first thing I did was stop taking all of my meds. There was also a segment on automatic weapons and gun control, and I think I know what you were hinting at there. The final segment was about child molesters, so I’m going to go ahead and kidnap Chris Hanson and bring him to you.
I can only assume that we’re having some sort of bacchanalia which will feature a Chris Hanson sacrifice. Am I, right? Wait, don’t tell me. I want it to be a surprise.
Much Love and Devotion,
Jillian Pilgrim
P.S. I made a little something for you. I hope you like it.
If I were independently wealthy I would totally be a recluse. I think I would be awesome at it. I would be able to dedicate all of my time to cleaning and developing my neurosis. I realize that most people dream of a life where they could easily afford to travel all the time and enjoy nice restaurants, etc. I like these things in theory, but not so much in practice. For example, I always think I want to go to a nice new restaurant, but then Ben and I will sit down to order and I’ll start to calculate the odds that someone in that kitchen has neglected to properly wash their hands, or has coughed near the food, or secretly harbors a desire to kill me and has thus poisoned my food. Every meal I enjoy without dying just increases the odds that the next meal will be the one that finally does me in. Thinking like this is highly indicative of a successful future as a recluse.
As such I have been working on a plan to become wealthy enough to buy a large estate with extensive grounds that include a hedge maze. (Side note: Is it weird that my dream home is largely based on Kubrick’s interpretation of the hotel in The Shining?) This brings me to my big reveal: Internet, I have decided to start my own business. A prostitution ring/child care service. My thinking is that there are lots of single moms and dads out there who are in need of physical love and a babysitter. These parents on the go don’t have time for things like “dating” or “interviewing quality daycare providers.” So, here’s a solution! A sexy man or woman shows up at your house in the morning, he or she provides some dirty adult services of your choosing, then you go to work and the sexy man or lady provides some clean child services of your choosing. The hourly prices are a little more than you might normally pay for a good hooker, but still less than you would pay for a highly qualified nanny.
If you are interested in an employment opportunity, please email me with your qualifications, including sex acts performed and maximum number of children you’ll mind at one time. If you are interested in becoming a customer of Totally Legitimate Babysitting Services , please email me and I’ll send you some more detailed information. If you are interested in turning this into a cheeky sitcom with a title like Debbie Does Daycare or Spunky Screwya (these may actually be better porn titles, I tend to work a little blue), please send me money.
Holden Caulfield.
I have a real job that is not blogging related. That real job is sending me to the Manila. In the Philippines. In Asia. And I have so much to say about it, but since I don’t blog about work I’ll just say in March expect some super awesome international blogging. Primarily about sexy Asian ladies. And maybe delicious ice cream. Possibly together for my submission to Penthouse.
So, in lieu of actually talking about why I’m going to Manila, I’m going to talk about how horribly and embarrassingly frightened I am of the flight over there. First some back story:
I hate flying.
Additional back story:
I come from a long line of flight phobics, by which I mean my father hates flying. He’s been on a plane once and he tried to make them land halfway through the flight and he had to be sedated. True story. As a result of my father’s phobia we never took family vacations that involved flying. I didn’t get on a plane for the first time until after college. And it was horrible. Not only for me but for the poor bastard that got stuck next to me on the plane.
Picture this, a 22 year old Jill gets on a plane in Logan headed to Chicago. She is trying to look as normal as possible despite the fact that she is having a giant panic attack. Coming down the center aisle is a rather attractive young man. The following is running through my head (writing in the third person about myself is too hard):
Dearest Jesus, do not let this guy sit next to me. There is a 99% chance I am going to throw up and I don’t want to do it in front of this guy. Please Jesus. I will sacrifice a million virgins to you. And several goats. And possibly some kittens. Whatever you’re into. Just don’t let this guy sit next to me.
And then that dude sat next to me. And I cursed Jesus and vowed to spend my days making derisive Paint images of Him.
The guy sitting next to me was really nice. Probably because he had no idea that I was about to lose my shit all over him.
So, the plane takes off and the meltdown begins. It is epic. It is me, head between my knees, crying, and praying very loudly. My poor seat neighbor is horrified. He looks over at me and asks, in a rather frightened tone, if I’m going to be okay. I respond, no. He asks if I want to hold his hand. So, I do. This is a bad idea. You know how on cheesy sitcoms there is always this particular scene when a woman is giving birth? The one where the woman is clenching her husband’s hand so tightly that she is about to break his fingers? I did that. In real life. To a stranger. And I wasn’t even pregnant.
Subsequent flights have not been much better. And I’m pretty nervous/morbidly curious to see how the 20 hours in the air goes. If I don’t die it will be a success. I’m setting the bar pretty high.
Side Note: I generally do better when I fly with Ben. Because Ben is an airline pilot. Seriously. I married an airline pilot. The irony is not lost on me. Or maybe it is. I’m not entirely sure what irony means.
Oh Internet, how long has it been since I updated you on the state of my mental health? Too long, you say. That’s what I thought.
Let me give you the haiku version first. Still crazy in head. Pharmaceuticals help some. Jesus Banana.
Now for the slightly longer, but still appropriate blog length, version:
I no longer see the sun. I leave for work and its dark. I come home from work and its dark. This is a problem as I require sunlight in order to function/remain not dangerously crazy. So, my body is rebelling. How? you ask. Well, its decided it no longer requires sleep. This is never a good sign. Not sleeping is a precursor to stabbing people totally legal activities. Another bad sign? Not eating. Of course not eating has another, less violent, side effect… sweet, sweet, weight loss. Primarily in my breasts. And there’s nothing a girl wants more than smaller breasts!
Here’s the thing about having an anxiety disorder, it sucks. I wake up with my heart pounding, my muscles cramped, my jaw sore from grinding my teeth. Lame. BUT, don’t despair for me, there is an upside! And here it is, I am so fucking productive when I’m anxious. Maybe productive isn’t the right word. What’s it called when you accomplish lots of shit that doesn’t actually need to be accomplished? That’s what I do when I’m in a particularly panicky state. Its truly scary. See, when a person wakes up in the middle of the night and is in the throes of a panic attack she will not be falling back to sleep for an extended period of time. Fact: There is nothing good on television at 2:00 in the morning. So, what is a girl to do? Well, obviously the logical thing is to read all sorts of obscure and random stuff so that she can shock her husband with her awesome useless knowledge. For example, today Ben and I had the following conversation:
Ben: How was your day?
Jill: Did you know that a coyote in Maine was found to be 89% wolf?
Ben: Huh. Okay.
Jill: And 22% of coyotes in Maine are part wolf?
Ben: Oh.
Jill: And 90% of Maine is forested?
Ben: Lets just say you know more about Maine than I do.
Jill: And wolves. And coyotes.
And then Ben cried because I am so much more awesome than he is. So, I made him this to cheer him up.
And that is why being crazy is awesome. Except for the smaller breasts. You can’t win them all.
Dearest People Who Read This,
My brain hurts, so I’m going to do something a little different today. I’m going to share lots of random thoughts. None of which are related. Well, they are related in the sense that they originated in my brain parts, but that’s it. Essentially, I’m too lazy to work any smooth transitions into this post. My blogging skills are pretty much unmatched.
Random Thought #1
Today I walked into a public restroom that smelled just like peppermint and cupcakes. It was like this bathroom had once been a bakery. What made it smell this way? Its an olfactory mystery. I found it very disconcerting.
Random Thought #2
Hustler Magazine pays like $1000.00 for stories about kinky sexual sub-cultures. This information both depresses and inspires me.
Random Thought #3
If I were a hamster I would be so pissed. Its like your only choice is to live in a glass cage, among your own feces, with a goddamn wheel. Until your 6 year old owner decides to “hug” you, which really means “squeeze you until your insides rupture.” Like there are no wild hamsters. If you are a hamster you’re only option is to toil away in an aquarium, abused and eventually murdered by a child.
Random Thought #4
I would murder a homeless guy for some Fudgie The Whale Cake right now. Like gunned down in the street for sea mammal ice cream cake.
Random Thought #5
I would sleep with Jason Bateman before George Clooney. And Stone Philips before Jason Bateman. And the corpse of Stalin before anyone on the Jersey Shore. Oh, and Ben before everyone. Except for Jesus. Because I’m a Christian for Christ’s sake.
Random Thought #6
The end.
Love,
Jill Pilgrim
I just now had an epiphany. An epiphany so large that I had to share it with the Internet right away.
I AM A FUCKING CRAZY PERSON.
Tonight, as I was going through my nightly ritual of blog reading (aka fulfilling my voyeuristic tendencies) while mentally reviewing my day (aka obsessing), it occurred to me that I’ve crossed over from delightful eccentric to FUCKING CRAZY PERSON.
What clued me in to this transformation, you ask? Well let me paint a picture for you:
I am sitting on my couch, going through my Google reader, eating a 100 calorie pack of popcorn. It suddenly occurs to me that I have never eaten this particular brand of popcorn before. Though this would not alarm those of you who still have your strangle hold on sanity, I am alarmed. I think of the statistical odds of a sudden adult onset allergy to whatever synthetic butter product is on the popcorn. I start to panic, so I do the logical thing and go outside, figuring if I pass out I have a better chance of being noticed and thereby saved if I’m out in the open as opposed to alone in my apartment.
After a few minutes outside I start to laugh at my own craziness and go back inside. Where I continue laughing. Alone. Causing my dog distress and confusion.
I stop laughing and return to my blog reading. As I’m reading, I start to think of the millions of things I have to get done this week. I take out my voice recorder and start to record my to-do list (this is a story in and off itself, the whole voice recorder thing. we’ll table that for another day).
Imagine now, my surprise, when I go to listen to my to-do list before going to bed (also part of my OCD nightly ritual) and it sounds like this:
1. Get paper towels
2. Drop off laundry
3. Boring work stuff
4. Jesus fucking Christ Coco, why do these people tan so much? They look ridiculous. (yells at the tv) You look ridiculous! Its like the strangest sub-culture ever, like I understand cannibals more than I understand these people. And why are all the men hairless? How do you wake up one day and think, “I really need to be hairless. And more orange. And I should see how many times I can say vibin’ in the next 5 minute period.”
5. Book physical therapy appointment.
And so it occurred to me that in one single evening I had:
A) Imagined a fictious, but deadly allergy
B) Taken steps to ensure my lifeless body was quickly discovered when I died from said allergy
C) Frightened my dog with hysterical laughter
D) Accidentally tape recorded myself talking to my dog about reality tv
Just wanted to share.
Fun fact, Ben and I started officially dating just 3 short years ago today. And now we’re happily married! Or at least I am, Ben is chained to the radiator right now, so I’ll have to ask him for his opinion later.
Anywho, its a new year and all that good stuff, so I feel as though I should share my resolutions with you. I assume you’re terribly interested. Its an exciting one. Are you ready? This year I resolve to… something or other. I’m struggling to come up with a resolution. Or at least the kind of resolution you can share in polite company when asked by some stupid acquaintance, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?” I’m think my REAL resolution, which is to catch a wild moose then castrate it then watch it develop devil antlers, would confuse and horrify some of my more uptight friends. So, I feel like I need another resolution, one that is more pc. But I still want this resolution to be something I can accomplish. Here are some ideas I’ve been bandying about:
- Play tambourine in a garage band comprised exclusively of 14 year old boys.
- Conquer my fear of throwing up (this one may require me becoming bulimic, but I’m open)
- Mail Stone Philips one love letter a day for 365 days
- Teach Coco Spanish so that she and I can have secret conversations in front of Ben
That’s all I’ve come up with so far, so I was thinking it would be awesome if you could share your resolution and if any of them are any good I’ll just do that. We’ll be resolution buddies! Our bond shall be unbreakable.
Next topic.
What I Did On My Summer Vacation New Year’s Eve
I am old and like to go to bed early, lets just start with that.
When discussing what we would do for New Year’s, Ben and I agreed that we wanted to keep it fairly low key. Something fun, but not too raucous. We decided on the Boston Pops Orchestra. I love classical music, I love Symphony Hall, done and done. I bought tickets for New Year’s Eve without looking too closely at the program for the evening.
Fast forward to last night. Ben and I arrive at Symphony Hall, we look like this:
Almost everyone else looked like this:
Clearly something was amiss. See, what I had failed to notice when I bought our tickets was that Amanda Palmer, from The Dresden Dolls, was going to be accompanying the Pops. And as such, the audience was full of teenagers dressed as homeless people from the 20s? Or something. I’m not hip, so I could be getting it wrong. Mixed in with the Amanda Palmer fans were some frightened elderly, who also thought they were just going to a nice classical concert, but were in fact walking into something entirely different. Something that involved performance art. And a silent film where some old guy has a baby, then feeds his baby a watch, and then the baby explodes into light, and then the old guy drinks vodka. That shit totally happened. I saw this silent film IN REAL LIFE and was unable to stop laughing. The people sitting next to me did not appreciate my lack of appreciation.
There was a variety of openning acts, some confusing (see above) and some awesome. April Smith and The Great Picture Show played one of the smaller lounges in Symphony Hall and they were awesome. So awesome that I wanted to have my picture taken with them, but I chickened out and just took a picture in front of their equipment while they were on break:
Side Note: Please excuse all the blurry photos. We weren’t supposed to use our flash and neither Ben nor I could figure out how to take a non-blurry photo without a flash. We finally broke the rules and took this photo from our seats:
This was also not appreciated.
I will say that the evening was wonderful. Great music, great people watching, and I got to kiss a hot piece of ass at midnight:
The end.
Unrelated note: I am a finalist in the 20sb Bootlegger Awards for Funniest Blogger. BLOWS MY MIND! For anyone who nominated me, I really appreciate it. You guys are awesome, and it makes my day to see my name in the same category as Lilu, Maxie, Nicole, Matt and Cheryl. Its an honor just being nominated, etc., etc.
I may have mentioned here before that I’m someone who enjoys solitude on occasion. In keeping with that particular personality trait, I sometimes suck as a friend. I am notoriously difficult to get in touch with: I rarely keep my phone on, I don’t have a Facebook account, I check my personal email every couple of days. Ben is the only person whose calls I always answer. There is a running joke with my friends regarding my voicemail. I only answer my phone about 40% of the time and I never check my messages, as a result my mailbox is almost always full. You could confess to murder on my voicemail and no one would know, this is how committed I am to not listening to my voicemail.
This is not because I don’t love my friends deeply, this is just the way Jesus made me, and who am I to question Jesus? My friends, however, collectively hate Jesus and refuse to accept this reasoning and as a result I end up apologizing. A lot. My stock apology is as follows:
I am so sorry (insert name). I love and care about you, I’ve just been busy this last week which is why I missed your call regarding the tragic death of your family pet. I have a lot of mental issues that require large chunks of time spent alone analyzing small and insignificant portions of my day and it doesn’t always leave time for checking my voicemail. You look really pretty today though, have I mentioned that? Because you do, it really can’t be overstated how pretty you look. You should probably take your top off.
By the end of the apology my friend is frightened and disoriented, and accepts my apology simply because she’s now desperate to exit this situation. The compliments and sexual come on work to take the focus away from the initial incident that made said friend angry, and put the focus on the current situation that is making said friend uncomfortable. Its kind of my signature move.
This brings me to my next point. I am also horrible at commenting on the blogs that I read. Again, this is not because I don’t adore those blogs, its because I AM NOT INTERESTING. I put that in all caps because I thought it added some interest to the fact that I’m not interesting. I used to be awesome at blog comments, meaning that if I read it, I commented. Now, I am awful. I read a billion blogs every.single.day. and comment maybe once a month. As a blogger I feel shitty about this. As the kind of person who is too lazy to check her voicemail, I’ve accepted it. Even when I used to comment, my comments were awful. I require a lot of time to come up with offensive witticisms. Case in point, it just took me about 20 minutes to think of the word witticism. So, to everyone in my blogroll, an apology:
I am so sorry (insert name). I love and care about you, I’ve just been busy reading your blog last week, which is why I ran out of the time required to think of a comment. I have a lot of mental issues that require large chunks of time spent alone analyzing every little thing I say on your blog. It is paralysis, by analysis. You understand, don’t you? You look really pretty today though, have I mentioned that? Because you do, it really can’t be overstated how pretty you look. You should probably take your top off.
And now onto the last item today on my List of Things at Which I Am Horrible: You know that saying, What’s good for the gander is good for the goose? I hate that saying. Because, see, even though I don’t always answer Mary’s calls, my feelings get hurt when she doesn’t answer mine. And you know how I am awful at commenting? I get insecure when my posts don’t get comments.
In conclusion, something something something.*
*I’m also horrible at coming up with tidy endings for my posts.
At my core, I am an insecure narcissist who needs lots of approval from others in order to continue functioning. It follows that one of my favorite things in life is the specific brand of validation called “blog awards.” There’s a little problem though, I also lack the proper follow through to acknowledge and pass on these awards. So, I’m going to kind of make up for it now, in a totally half-assed way. Generally, these awards require the awardee (totally a word) to like share random facts and previously undisclosed information. So, here’s some random shit about me.
1. My first, and most enduring, crush is on Stone Phillips.
2. My favorite color is red. Like blood and tomatoes.
3. I read a ton. I generally go through a couple of books a week.
4. I require a lot of alone time. Mostly because I am socially awkward. And awkwardness, while hilarious, can also be exhausting.
5. I did pageants as a kid. Word of advice, don’t ever, ever, EVER do this to your children. Or if you do, please put aside money for their future therapy bills.
6. I don’t drink. Weird, huh?
7. I’m not an alcoholic or a Mormon. Even weirder, right?
8. Ben and I met in a bar. That was back when I was still drinking.
9. I actually don’t drink because Jesus came to me in a dream and told me not to drink anymore.
10. Not really, but wouldn’t that be hilarious.
So yeah, learning is fun, right? Now the second part of blog awards involves passing the awards along to other blogs. Small problem, I read about 20 million blogs and they’re all fucking awesome. And way classier than this shit. So, here is a screen shot of about an eighth of my reader:
You’re all winners of Jill Pilgrim’s Half Assed Blog Award. Congrats!!
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